The AAUT, or the Australian Award for University Teaching, is a national award for quality in tertiary education. And the reason I applied was, there's a couple of reasons. There's a pragmatic reason. One was for going for promotion and for recognition, maybe a little bit of ego chucked in there.

But what I got from it, from the application process, was really getting a good understanding of what my strengths were as an educator, and what areas that I needed to improve, and that type of thing.

We are definitely entering a new world of tertiary education, and we need creative educators. So I think an award like the AAUT is really good to ground yourself in what skills you have and how you can develop your skill set to become the best educator you can be.

So winning the citation last year was great recognition for the efforts I've put in.

A million years ago, back in I think 2002, I won the Australia New Zealand Marketing Educator of the Year Award and I have always had at my call quality education. How can we get the best outcomes for the students?

I went without getting going for an OCTAL award which I say don't do.

I say go get the OCTAL  Award first, and then, because the way they've structured it is very much in line, well I think it's definitely in line with the AAUT Awards, so once you've got the OCTAL, it's actually quite simple to jump across to the AAUT Awards.

So I would say work with them, they're just a fantastic crew down there and I've enjoyed every minute of working with them, and learnt a lot too from them.

Yes, so there's a few tips I could give you on actually going and trying to put one of these awards in.

And one of them is to consider your referees.

So consider who you're going to use and how they can add to your case.

And that takes a lot of thinking and a lot of time and a lot of approaching people and big favours on their part.

So think about that. The other thing is collect evidence.

Now, this is the same for promotion too. Collect evidence from students, qualitative and quantitative evidence from awards you have won.

What I do is I have a separate folder in my emails and I just any awards that any emails that I can use as evidence I put into that.

So if you've got a passion for teaching and you've got a passion for really enhancing student learning outcomes, I would strongly suggest you go for one of these national awards.

I think there's a range of different awards you can go for.

There's citations, there's program awards, there's the teacher and then there's a big kahuna, the big teacher of Australia award.

We need creative, academics that have at their heart their core value a quality education in a creative way that delivers learning outcomes for the students.

And I think by undertaking one of these awards, or at least putting the process in, it really puts you in a good position to improve and enhance your own practice.

So go for it.